


if there's a hell for lovers

by peridium



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s10e22 The Prisoner, M/M, Non-Penetrative Sex, SAD shower sex though, Shower Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-15
Updated: 2015-05-15
Packaged: 2018-03-30 16:31:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3943750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peridium/pseuds/peridium
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel puts himself back together piece by piece. He has his grace and he could do it in an instant, forget that this ever happened, but that’s not what he wants. So he lingers with Dean’s glittering eyes imprinted on the insides of his eyelids, smoothing each bruise down into the skin of his vessel, stitching each laceration back together, remembering how it felt to reassemble another human body years ago. Years that feel like nothing and everything.</p><p>He goes to Dean, then. (A 10.22 coda.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	if there's a hell for lovers

**Author's Note:**

> UMMMMMMMM... well, so, you know, here's this. Sadness and woe, failure to communicate, bad coping mechanisms, the usual. Possible very slight overtones of sub!Dean? The title is from "Damn Things Over" by empires.
> 
> I'm on Tumblr over [here](http://sunbeamdean.tumblr.com).

Castiel puts himself back together piece by piece. He has his grace and he could do it in an instant, forget that this ever happened, but that’s not what he wants. So he lingers with Dean’s glittering eyes imprinted on the insides of his eyelids, smoothing each bruise down into the skin of his vessel, stitching each laceration back together, remembering how it felt to reassemble another human body years ago. Years that feel like nothing and everything.

He goes to Dean, then.

The shower is running downstairs, such a typical bunker noise that Castiel could pretend things are tenuously normal as they have been. He lingers at the door to the bathroom, listening for some hint of Dean’s mood, but it’s only the pounding of hot water and ragged breath.

Feeling slightly absurd, Castiel knocks. He lets a tendril of grace curl around his knuckles, amplifying the sound so Dean will hear it over the shower.

It seems to work: “ _What_.” Not a question, not an invitation, barely anything more than a growl.

Castiel debates the usefulness of answering. The bunker is Dean’s, but it’s his as well, or so they have told him. He drums his fingers against the door, then calls out, “I’m coming in unless you tell me not to.”

He waits, wonders. It’s quiet, so he pushes the door open.

Dean’s body is nothing new to Castiel. He knows its inner workings, every synapse and sinew. He doesn’t understand the way he responds to seeing it bare and gleaming with moisture, the way his heart quickens at the curve of Dean’s biceps and the way his knees feel—just for a terrifying moment—weak when he notices the droplets clinging to Dean’s heat-reddened mouth.

“What,” Dean says again. Flat, like his affect and his eyes. The water pooling near the drain is pink and there are still rivulets of blood sliding down Dean’s sides, his thighs.

Castiel doesn’t look away from Dean’s face. “Well?”

Dean’s eyes snap shut. His throat works, the fingers at his sides twitching and then curling into fists. “Well _what_? You’re leaving, right?”

“No,” Castiel says, startled into earnestness. “I hadn’t planned to.”

Dean’s brow furrows. His jaw is tight. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Castiel shrugs. He slips out of his coat and hangs it next to Dean’s bathrobe. “A lot of things, depending on who you ask. Why? What’s wrong with you?” He lets a beat pass. “But we’ve been over that.”

That could have backfired badly, but all Dean does is make himself smaller, his shoulders hunched under the stream of water.

Castiel takes a step closer, waiting for the backlash. It doesn’t come. Dean’s eyelashes are clumped into sparkling dark spikes and Castiel wants, badly, to touch his face. It’s clean now, his ears pink and his freckles stark.

“I just.” Dean is gritting his teeth; Castiel can tell. “If you’d just fucking hit me back, you fucking idiot. Jesus, what’s _wrong_ with you?”

“If I’d hit you back?” His chest light and hollow, Castiel touches the wet slope between Dean’s neck and shoulder. “Then what?”

Castiel’s slacks, socks, shirt are all getting wet. Perhaps with time it will seem consequential.

Tendons all locked tight, Dean barks out a laugh. “I don’t know. I was waitin’ for it, but I don’t know what I was gonna do. Stop? Fuck if I know.”

Castiel’s hands, palms and fingers and knuckles all, ache to hold Dean’s face. “Maybe you would have. But I don’t want to hurt you. I told you that.”

Dean snorts. “What the fuck is the point of this, Cas? You’re all juiced up. You’re the real damn deal. Go home, okay? That’s gotta be better than—”

“Dean.” Castiel considers the sweep of Dean’s collarbones before he remembers to focus on Dean’s face. Oh, maybe it’s his imagination—a human failing he’s picked up with too much gusto—but Dean’s eyes seem softer, greener. “Last week, I watched an entire episode of Dr. Phil. And I was _invested_. Two days ago, I wondered if we should paint one of the kitchen walls another color. I Googled paint chips.”

Dean’s gaze is steely. Uncomprehending.

Castiel breathes. “Do you really think I belong in Heaven?”

Arguing with a naked man holding a washcloth feels absurd, but here they are. Dean scrubs the thing across his face and tosses it into the corner; it goes _smack_ against the tiles. “I don’t think you belong— _here_.”

This near, Castiel can feel each heave of Dean’s breath. His breath smells coppery, like blood. It may mean something that Castiel’s mouth feels magnetized to Dean’s regardless, that when they lean in toward each other Castiel feels almost nothing but the longing twist of his own heart and the relief when their mouths fit together as easily as he had always, privately, hoped they would.

For a moment, it’s perfect. Warm breath, Dean’s lips and his ragged breath, the flutter of Castiel’s pulse.

Dean snarls, then. He grabs hold of Castiel’s hips, sinks his teeth into Castiel’s lip, curls his tongue behind Castiel’s teeth, and Castiel—

Castiel stops. Doesn’t pull away, just stops. Holds his breath, his grace, his everything. He waits.

When Dean’s lips brush his own away, breath ghosting over his chin, he returns to the moment. He kisses Dean with his hands around the back of Dean’s neck. He touches Dean’s back, the span of warm flesh between his shoulder blades; he wonders about what might have been, if either of them had been braver sooner. Dean tastes of ash and stale coffee and blood. His hands catch at Castiel’s chest, skidding against the sodden fabric.

Dean shoves him up against the shower wall and Castiel goes stock-still.

“Hey,” he says. That’s a word he first learned from Dean.

Dean pants, eyes dark. “Hey,” he echoes, and he takes a half-step back, regaining just enough of his gentleness.

Castiel draws him into a slow kiss, their lips clinging and then parting again. Long, careful moments. Dean’s forehead tips against Castiel’s; their noses brush.

“I can’t,” Castiel says, slow, “watch this happen to you. Not without doing something. Anything that I can.”

Dean’s right arm twitches and flexes. “I don’t know, Cas.” The next kiss hurts, all teeth and sucking mouths, and Castiel should stop it but he can’t make himself. Next time he will. “I don’t know what’s me and what’s—”

“I know,” Castiel says, not sure whether he knows or not. He touches Dean’s back, his hips. Dean’s erection presses in the space between them and Castiel is distantly startled at the response of his own body, his cock stiffening in the damp heaviness of his slacks.

The sound Dean makes is too close to a sob. Castiel wants to hold him nearly as much as he wants to do what he does next, which is to reach between them and fit his hand over the smooth heat of Dean.

“Oh,” Dean says, bright and shocked. Sounding like himself. “Oh, Cas, fuck.” 

“Yeah,” Castiel agrees. Dean is weighty in his hand, his hips twitching into Castiel’s grip and his forehead pressed to Castiel’s temple. “Be still.”

Dean whines, the sound descending into a half-feral growl, but he doesn’t move. That’s enough. Castiel touches him slowly, overheated skin and the delicate weight of his balls and the soft, soft space behind them. The thoughtful press of Castiel’s fingers there makes Dean shudder hard, his fingers splayed against the wet tile next to Castiel’s shoulder.

“Cas.” Dean’s voice has gone small; it shakes. “I really need you to touch me. Like, right the fuck now.”

From the moment they met, Castiel has known Dean’s atoms and the strands of his DNA, but what he treasures more is how he’s come to know Dean’s mind. His humor and self-deprecation and kindness. It lets him hear the rest of that plea even if Dean doesn’t voice it: _Even though I don’t deserve it. Even though you should have fucked off down the highway by now._

“ _Cas._ ”

“Come on,” Castiel says, angling his head to kiss Dean’s mouth. He wraps his hand tight around Dean’s erection and swallows Dean’s moan as they start to move together, Dean rocking into his touch as he figures out the right angle, the best way to catch Dean’s precome with his fingertips and smooth it down the length of him to make him whimper into Castiel’s open mouth.

“This is not,” Castiel tells him, “the worst violence I’ve seen you do.”

Dean tries to snarl, but the noise breaks halfway through into a fresh moan. It’s costing him, Castiel can tell, to keep this so deliberate and careful.

“You’re good.” Castiel traces the shape of Dean’s ear with his fingers, touching the corded muscles of his neck, shoulder, chest. “You will come through this.”

“ _Fuck_.” His whole body shaking, Dean sinks his teeth into Castiel’s lower lip, hard enough to draw blood from a human. “Fuck,” he says again as Castiel stills his hand and turns his face away. “Come on, come _on_.”

“Dean.”

“Please.”

And Castiel is only—whatever he is. Not human, but weak for this one lovely, terrified human. So he kisses him and lets Dean curl trembling fingers into his sodden shirtfront and kisses him again as Dean arches into him. And he knows that whether Dean does fight this off, he will be here, coaxing him into tenderness and holding him when he fails.

As Dean tucks his face into the side of Castiel’s neck and orgasms with nothing more dramatic than a low sigh, his come spilling hot into Castiel’s hand and over his sleeve, Castiel vows eternity again. Silently, this time, but with no less fervor.

Dean reaches for him and Castiel stops him, holding both his wrists in his hands. He loves Dean, desperately and wholly, and he doesn’t trust him.

“Not now,” he says to Dean’s pleasure-slack expression of confusion. “Just… not now.” Castiel wants—of course he wants. His erection is pressed uncomfortably to the fly of his slacks, aching every time he catches sight of a particularly beautiful angle to Dean’s face and every time Dean’s tongue darts out to clean shower water off his lips. But he wants better for them.

Piece by piece, the human way, Castiel takes off his clothing while Dean watches and doesn’t touch. With a hand at Dean’s waist, he urges them both under the showerhead. The water pressure is excellent as ever.

They get clean together, touching only incidentally—brushes of hands, hips, ankles. Castiel’s body remembers how to do this, the endless Sisyphean routine of it a comfort after too many days of stale snack foods and gasoline-stained hands at the Gas-N-Sip.

When they’re done, they linger. Dean doesn’t look at him; shame or rising anger, Castiel doesn’t know, and he won’t probe into Dean’s thoughts to find out.

“Here.” He shuts off the water and takes Dean’s hand. Their fingers fit together as if they’ve done this dozens of times before. “I think it’s long past our bedtime.”

Castiel doesn’t need to sleep and he suspects Dean doesn’t either. But that’s physical and this is—something else, mental or spiritual. He’s getting better at learning the difference.

Head down and shoulders tense with the weight of the world, Dean follows Castiel out the door.


End file.
